DigiActive.org

A Broader Network for Digital Activism

Update:  Thanks to  feedback from Dirk Slater I’ve changed the title to “A Broader Network for Digital Activism”, which recognizes the great work that organizations like Tactical Tech have done to create  global networks of activists.

The Promise of Global Citizen Empowerment

The promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation by giving ordinary citizens around the world the ability to more effectively campaign for social and political causes. The collective result of these campaigns would be a global closing of the gap between the powerful and powerless and a fundamental shift in political life around the world.

The Reality of Limited Success

Yet this best case scenario is only one possible outcome of the injection of digital technology into politics. Repressive governments around the world have proven quite adept at spinning and blocking the tools of digital activism and censoring and persecuting activists. Though the technology-assisted protest movements in Iran, Moldova, and Egypt, received a great deal of press, they were not successful in challenging the political power structures in their countries or even in winning modest reforms.

For all its success in spreading information and facilitating the mobilization of people and resources, the successes of digital activism are few and far between and its future is far from assured. If we want to achieve the promise of digital activism, interventions will be necessary.

The Disconnected Players

There are many players who intervene on behalf of digital activism, whose actions serve to spread and strengthen it. There are governments, private foundations, non-profit and for-profit trainers and consultants, public intellectuals, software and hardware companies, the media, and of course the activists themselves. Together they create the digital activism ecosystem.

Yet these players do not see themselves as part of the same ecosystem. The COO of Facebook may meet with an official at the State Department, but a representative of Hivos, an active Dutch technology funder, probably will not be in the room. High-powered political technology consultants may meet prominent bloggers at a conference, but a representative of the GSM Association, which facilitates global mobile phone standardization, probably will not be invited.

In order to create a common agenda for the promotion of digital activism around the world, players must first see that they are playing on the same field.

The Need for a Network

What is needed in this field is a networking organization unlike any other. The purpose of this organization will not be to strengthen the bonds of an existing network, as is usually the case, but to create a network where none currently exists.

What would be the strategy of such an organization? The expectation would be to go straight to policy by holding events on mobile innovation or technical assistance programs and seeking to build collaborative relationships between the various institutions in the field.

However, starting at the institutional and policy level would be premature. The first step should be to focus on relationships. It is daunting to try to engineer organizational coordination between the Department of State and the GSM Association, but can Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton’s Senior Advisor on Innovation, share a coffee with Tom Phillips, Chief Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer at the GSMA? Yes, he could. Could Ory Okolloh, co-creator of the mobile crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, and Josh Elman, Twitter’s Product Manager, also be at that meeting? Yes, they could, and what an interesting meeting it would be. Imagine the e-mail thread the day after and the effect of future cooperation.

Priorities for the First Year

In its first year, this organization should seek to hold at least a dozen informal networking events around the world to bring together the key players in the disparate fields of digital activism so that they see each other as colleagues and collaborators. Initially, the role of the networking organization would only be to put players together, not to set a policy agenda. Follow-through would be up to participants themselves.

Though the potential returns of such a program could be enormous, the costs would be low: a few staff members to organize the events and the logistical cost of the events themselves. The goal of the program would be no more and no less than to create a network of people to build digital activism’s best future.

To download a PDF version, please click: